In the Policy Brief (9/18) about "Unemployment and its medium- to long-term effects - A reason to rethink labour market integration schemes", Matteo Antonini explains that labour market integration schemes should be adapted so as to offer more flexible solutions to the employed and avoid the medium and long-term effects of a period of unemployment.

The key messages of this last Policy Brief:

The consequences of a period of unemployment can be felt even after returning to work and are not limited to reduced financial resources.

Besides groups traditionally considered vulnerable to the negative consequences of a period of unemployment (e.g. older/low-skilled workers), new groups are emerging, including people with high levels of education.

Using an innovative longitudinal analysis shows a new professional instability for highly qualified people suggesting that existing social policies and labour market integration schemes should be adapted.

Prof. Laura Bernardi presides for the first time the Scientific Council of INED today in Paris.

Today Prof. Laura Bernardi, Professor of Sociology and Demography at UNIL, who directs the CCI1 and is member of IP201 and IP208 of NCCR LIVES, presides for the first time the meeting of the Scientific Council of INED (Institut national d’études démographiques) in Paris, of which she was already a member.

The Scientific Council is composed of representatives of statistics and survey organizations and of specialists from outside INED as Laura Bernardi, "chosen for their expertise in the field of population or another demography-related discipline". Its mission is to evaluate the Institute’s scientific orientations and to provide advisory opinions on any policy concerning scientific activity or recruitment profiles for new researchers.

The Institute’s overall missions are to study all aspects of population, to provide training in and through research, to keep the government, public authorities and general public informed about demographic questions and to disseminate French demographic research internationally.

To celebrate 20 Years of the Swiss Household Panel, the Swiss Journal of Sociology publishes a special issue on the topic "Understanding Social Dynamics: 20 Years of the Swiss Household Panel". The deadline to submit an abstract (proposing an idea for an article) has now been extened until the 20th December 2018.

In 2019, the Swiss Household Panel celebrates its 20th Birthday. On this occasion, we invite for contributions to an anniversary issue of the Swiss Journal of Sociology. The contributions should focus on social dynamics and make use of the longitudinal character of the panel data.

Panel studies have unique analytical advantages. They are essential to understand processes of mobility and inertia. In particular they make it possible to: (a) measure and analyse social change; (b) distinguish between permanent and transitory characteristics of a given phenomenon; and (c) study both intergenerational and intragenerational patterns of phenomena such as poverty, income dynamics, health conditions and practices or political positioning. In addition, they allow researchers to establish (robust) causal relationships between social phenomena. Household panels also allow for intra-household studies, such as the study of mutual influence of household members’ attitudes and behaviours over time. Panel data are therefore important for both academic research and for monitoring and evaluating policies.

For the special issue “Understanding Social Dynamics” of the Swiss Journal of Sociology, we welcome substantive contributions from different conceptual and theoretical horizons, addressing topics such as education, employment, material reward, health, social networks, integration, political behaviour, or attitudes and values. Comparative analyses based on the Cross-National Equivalent File (CNEF) are particularly welcome.

On Novembre 29TH, 2018 the NCCR LIVES will stand alongside the Swiss Refugee Council (SRC), for the first time in Bern, for an event offering several presentations about the situation of Somalian refugees and asylum seekers, in order to better understand the context in their country and the procedures that they face in Switzerland. This formula will be repeated later on to address other migration contexts from countries like Afghanistan, etc.

The 10th volume of the Life Course Research and Social Policies Springer book series edited by NCCR LIVES “Sequence Analysis and Related Approaches, Innovative Methods and Applications,” edited by Gilbert Ritschard and Matthias Studer, both affiliated to NCCR LIVES and Geneva School of Social Sciences University of Geneva, Switzerland, is now available in Open Access. A wealth of information for social scientists interested in quantitative life course analysis and other researchers.

This new volume provides innovative methods and original applications of sequence analysis (SA) and related methods for analyzing longitudinal data describing life trajectories such as professional careers, family paths, the succession of health statuses, or the time use. It pays special attention to the combined use of SA and other methods for longitudinal data as well as to alternatives to classical SA that consists in building typologies of sequences from their pairwise dissimilarities.

As such this book provides a wealth of information for social scientists interested in quantitative life course analysis, and all those working in sociology, demography, economics, health, psychology, social policy, and statistics.

Five chapters from LIVES reserachers

The Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research LIVES is happy that the publication includes five chapters with contributions from LIVES researchers:

Springer series on "Life Course Research and Social Policies" in open access

This Series invites academic scholars to present theoretical, methodological, and empirical advances in the analysis of the life course, and to elaborate on possible implications for society and social policies applications. Thanks to the NCCR LIVES funding, all those books are published in open access. The Series editors are Laura Bernardi, Dario Spini and Jean-Michel Bonvin.

The fifth edition of the LIVES Winter School (April 1 - 5, 2019) is the first organized in collaboration with Venice International University (on its campus of Isola di San Servolo) and led by the two VIU member universities: the University of Lausanne and the University of Padua. In particular, the Winter School 2019 will focus on training the participants in the production of journal articles as a fundamental aspect of the academic career they are approaching: with a “learning by doing” approach, they will prepare collaborative articles going through all stages of the research process, heading towards a joint publication as a medium-term follow-up. Register now, last places available! Final deadline: December 14, 2018

During an intensive one-week program, doctoral students and young researchers will work on various fields of Life Course research through a multidisciplinary approach (Sociology, Psychology, Social Psychology, Life-span Psychology, Social Demography and Social Policies) on vulnerability across the life course. The School first targets PhD students, but Post-doc researchers are also eligible.

Affiliated institutions

Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS), University of Bremen & Jacobs University (D)

Hallie Ford Center for Healthy Children & Families, Oregon State University (USA)

In an article for the journal Social Change in Switzerland, Philippe Wanner and Ilka Steiner show how migrant flows into Switzerland have changed over the last 25 years. In particular, the increase in immigration involving workers with high-level qualifications has been spectacular. The two researchers based their analysis on several original databases and demonstrate the predominant role played by the developing labour market in these changes.

Since the beginning of the 21st century Switzerland has experienced a significant increase in net migration. At the same time, the profile of migrant flows has changed dramatically, with the number of highly-qualified migrants more than doubling between 1991 and 2014. Using new data, Philippe Wanner and Ilka Steiner show that the number of new migrants with a tertiary education has increased from 30,000 in 1991 to 40,000 in 2000 and reaches more than 60,000 after 2007. Today migrants with high-level qualifications represent half of the total annual influx.

Immigration levels involving highly-qualified people vary across different nationalities. On the basis of a new survey, the authors show that the proportion of highly-qualified migrants exceeds 80% for French and UK nationals. It reaches two thirds for German and Austrian migrants, but is only 24% for new migrants from Portugal. In recent years, Spanish and Italian migrant flows in particular have undergone significant changes in their profile. Today over 50% are highly-qualified people, whereas historically these flows consisted of people with fairly basic qualifications.

The increase in highly-qualified migration can be explained by the demands of the Swiss labour market. New data show that over half of highly-qualified European immigrants had an employment contract in Switzerland before they arrived in the country. Nonetheless, the authors point out that international migration has only played a secondary role in response to the labour market's needs. Between 2010 and 2013 it was responsible for meeting less than 30% of the demand for workers with a tertiary education. New generations of young native Swiss, better qualified than their elders, have played the biggest role in this respect.